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PORTUGUESE AND DUTCH COMMERCIAL POLICIES 217 of the Fuggers of Augsburg, their factors had cabins and a diet assigned to them on the royal ships. As we have seen, however, Portugal's national achievement in the East was not traffic alone, but, in the patriotic vaunt of her historian, " cities, islands, and kingdoms first groaning under our feet, and then worshipping our Government." Such a system of direct dynastic trade was alike alien to the genius of the English nation and to the caution of Queen Elizabeth. The Dutch model came nearer to English ideas. During the long struggle with combined Spain and Portugal, the Dutch had to pay their armies and to feed themselves by sea-trade. How Holland, whose wind-swept fens did not yield crops to keep the people alive for much more than half the year, accomplished this feat, and turned her despairing land revolt into a triumphant oceanic war, forms a brilliant chapter in European history. Her national safety so vitally de- pended on maritime trade, that it became as clear a duty of the Dutch Government to promote private com- merce as it was for private commerce to fight the bat- tles of the republic. The States-General not only sub- sidized expeditions of discovery, but when the failure of such expeditions compelled them to withhold direct support from the public purse, they still offered a large reward to private adventure. This semi-national character stamped itself almost, although not quite, from the first on the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch voyages " to the countries lying on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope,"